So? Everyone will still be placed into separate shards.
No thanks. Trade chat would be unreadable. Auction house and craft orders would be even worse to manage. Even with a lot of things region wide, there are still realms I can post things on and not have to cancel and repost every 5 seconds to get a sale.
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Which company/game?
Just keep the “servers” to have a last name for unique first names.
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Sounds like what we have now? Outside of what…joining a guild?
Or are you saying to turn every character into a private server, that we name? Because I am not sure that is feasible either.
I think if they could they would prefer a single realm with separate instances kinda like guild wars. That said it wont happen less they remake the engine.
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So much this.
While it would make some sense from a population standpoint to just have a few mega servers for each region, timezone, and server type. You’d run into the issue of guild and character naming.
That is why we got connected realms for the low population server issue so that people could still keep their names.
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I read the topic title, and all I could think was:
One Realm to rule them all, One Realm to find them, One Realm to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Honestly, servers feel pointless outside of character-naming reasons. I wouldn’t mind more merges happening, at the very least.
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Guilds will be cross-realm as well, don’t forget.
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Reason why they don’t fully merge onto 1 realm per datacenter is probably character names.
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Right now, I still have a server community. We’ll see if that changes with cross realm guilds.
More Connected Realms would be nice, unless cross realm guilds and Warbands takes care of most of the things people seems to have a problem with.
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One of the mass exodus incidents in Old Republic happened due to mega servers and character names. And they have the options for spaces, hyphens and apostrophes already.
They also killed the RP community overnight with it.
I plead the 5th.
If I wanted to play on a madhouse zoo server, I would.
It will never work due to latency issues. We need servers in different locations. I’m on the East coast and I hate playing on the western data centers due to increased latency. It’s very noticeable.
You assume it’s done for technical reasons instead of financial ones.
This is the same company that has the story from the guy who gave the command to start the game talking about how they were too cheap to buy pre-assembled server boards and instead had him and one other guy spend days putting in memory on hundreds of these boards to save probably under $50,000 I’d estimate which isn’t a lot for a company. That’s pretty cheap.
Given an open purse they could absolutely do a mega-server. Or stop with the sharding and simply use more powerful hardware and a better architecture BUT they don’t have that. For your $15/month they’re not going to do that for you. WoW is a cash cow, it’s not in a growth phase. It’s something stuck in a stall or maybe a pasture and milked. It’s fed, kept alive, given its shots, but it’s not given improved accommodations, no one is looking for it to do anything. It brings in money and revenue, enough to justify its existence and continued development (albeit less content for money as the world soul trilogy is a hidden price increase, cementing faster expac releases at the same or more cost per expac and the practice of only 2 major patches plus launch whereas you used to get 2 years and minimum 3, often 4 major patches and raid tiers) but not enough to open the purse.
It also has disadvantages. It’s legacy, it’s built on a tangle of old and new code and systems and so on. You either have to re-engineer entirely which costs $$$$ that corporate probably doesn’t see as justified when the job of the WoW devs is to caretake and milk the dead end game property (face it it doesn’t have the growth potential of COD or mobile games) or deal with the increased time and costs and testing of working around that while integrating something new.
Right now their monumental task is closer integration of the factions which they can justify to corporate as a fact of life necessitated by the decrease in their subscriber-base. They can’t go back to corporate after doing that “solution” to the problem and ask for a server architecture re-engineering and upgrade because they’ll point to the work and money they spent integrating the factions and say hey, we thought we paid to fix that already. I don’t think it’s happening this decade.
If WoW is still alive, still profitable, and still being actively developed in 2030 then sure, maybe then enough time will have passed and the tech debt will be high enough and costs low enough that they will look at it.
Idk how they’d handle names.
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My mind went in another direction
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With 5 billion people playing WoW as per my graph math they’d have to invent new server tech that’d make CCP blush.
Elder scrolls online has one mega server and they seem to do fine with it. What’s the difference here?